The explosion of data in volume, variety, and velocity (colloquially known as Big Data) across enterprises of all types, from government entities to commercial businesses, has forced leaders to reevaluate the tools and methods used for informed decision making. Visualization plays a key role in connecting decision makers to their data. Visualization is particularly important when there are many data sources, each with large amounts of data.
No longer is it reasonable to make critical decisions based on partial information from a single silo of data; nor is it feasible to cycle through myriad separate sources and tools to arrive at unified result. Separate systems designed for strategic analysis, steady-state operations management and crisis management further complicates the information management challenge and therefore the decision-making environment. A new approach is required in which data from many silos can be explored concurrently, in an ad-hoc way to support the enterprise as it deals with competition, complexity and uncertainty. Industry is frustrated by the typical monolithic approach; it calls for a polymorphic approach—a flexible environment in which new data sources and analytic techniques can be brought to bear, as needed, in real time. Further, proprietary data are compared to trends in exogenous or open data sources in a non-invasive way and without risk of cross contamination.